Re-use of public sector information

The plenary session of the European Parliament on 4 April 2019 formally confirmed the agreement reached with the Council in the interinstitutional negotiations. The Committee of Permanent Representatives also approved the compromise on 6 February 2019.

 

The European Parliament and the Council agreed in January on a compromise to revise Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of public sector information (PSI Directive). The revision aims to further broaden the scope of the Directive and facilitate the re-use of public sector data. The revision includes changes that may also be of interest to the German social security system and its institutions.

 

Public sector data accessible under national rules will be made available digitally and free of charge. High-quality data sets, i.e. data whose further use is associated with considerable advantages for society, the environment or the economy, are to be made available free of charge via Application Programming Interfaces and, where relevant, also offered as bulk downloads. A list of categories of these data sets is found in the Annex to the draft Directive, including statistics. This could also include the statistical data sets of the umbrella associations of the German social insurance system and the social insurance institutions (for a summary of the revisions to the Directive, see the detailed article Feb 2019).

 

The draft Directive has yet to be formally adopted by the Council. Member States will then have two years to transpose the Directive into national law.